Peter's Blog

I am going to experiment with a new note taking device I bought in Tesco. It is hand held and uses a pen-type input device which I had to buy as an extra. It's search facilities are poor but it has good handwriting recognition, everything I enter is immediately recognised and the are no problems entering cursive script (unlike the palm where you have to enter o n e l e t t e r a t a t i m e) and it doesn't need recharging. It cost me about £2.50 in total. It is an A6 paper notebook and a propelling pencil. The plan is to take notes and transcribe them into the computer later.

Linode looks interesting. It is a hosting service whereby you get a virtual linux box all of your own. It is on a server and it is shared with 40 other people but you get 64M of ram to yourself, 3G of disk space that you partition yourself as you see fit and a selection of linux distributions to choose from. You install linux, have root access and basically can install whatever software you like on it (even painful gentoo compilation). It is like having your own linux box out there on the web.

It can be used not just for a web server but ftp, mail, proxy, DNS server, backup server, you name it. It sounds more interesting than Site5 which gives plenty of power except there is no root access, cannot use wget to get packages, no compiler, two year old version of Python, no fastcgi or mod_python just slow cgi, etc etc. Linode costs $20 or £10.50 a month which is more expensive and the support would not extend to patching your kernel like Site5 would do. Then again, unlike a shared host, if some other tosser you share with uses up all the mysql connections with a flaky script your account does not suffer (happened for the second time to my knowledge this sunday).

I'd be tempted to go with this rather than renew my site5 deal.

Giving the latest google toy, Google Accelerator a try. So far it has saved 2.6 seconds of my life from being wasted!

The license agreement says I cannot use it at work, which is a shame since today our 4Mbps microwave link was running pretty poorly. A couple of months ago our web site got hacked and our ISP put a throttle on our link: even though they host the site on their own server (running some un-patched version of IIS).

Updated this blog to Drupal. Went smoothly enough, tried using the democratica theme as it is one of the few drupal themes that resizes horizontally to fit screen width but it had some problems:

• if main content was not long enough, there was an error whereby the background to the right side panel was not long enough and did not meet the footer.
• viewing in IE6 on my Dell inspiron 500m, the background to the page loaded horribly slowly and I had to edit the css to make it plan grey
• it's css is vastly complicated and spread over a number of css files. Does not strike me as a clean or efficient design.

so I went back to my theme although I am a little sick of it.

I have wanted to categorise my blog entries using tags for a while now but there is still no official drupal module to do it (an api for developers but no user level module). I had a google and found awTags which is exactly what I want. You can now see the nice tags block on my site.

So I had a nice tagging system and over 700 articles with no tags. asTags provides an admin page to add tags to nodes with selected existing tags but no more. Looking through the code it had a nice clean api and I was able to hack to to do a search on the database for a search term and add a tag to matching nodes. I used the mysql REGEXP operator so that I could match whole words:

   1  function awTagsAPI_AddToExistingTagSearch($search, $addTag) {
   2    $addTid = awTagsAPI_GetTagID($addTag);
   3  
   4    if ($addTid == FALSE)
   5      $addTid = awTagsAPI_AddTag($addTag);
   6  
   7      $strSearch = str_replace( "'", "''", $search);
   8    $result = db_query("SELECT nid FROM {node} WHERE body REGEXP " +
   9                       "'[[:<:]]%s[[:>:]]' OR title REGEXP '[[:<:]]%s[[:>:]]'", $strSearch, $strSearch);
  10    $nCount = 0;
  11    while ($nid = db_fetch_object($result)) {
  12      awTagsAPI_AddTagToNode($nid->nid, $addTid, TRUE);
  13      $nCount = $nCount + 1;
  14    }
  15  
  16    return $nCount; // return count to display in summary
  17  }

In an ideal world I would have used drupals own search facility but the api for that is horribly mixed up with user interface code so I searched the database directly. The above allows an amount of regexp syntax to be used, e.g. search for (outlook|thunderbird|exchange|gmail) and tag with 'email'. However, the above does not search comments, only node title and body.

Still, it worked good enough for me and I've added lots of tags.

Got a Linode and I've installed ubuntu on it. So far it seems really quick: ssh login is fast and responsive, better than site5. This may be because the server does not have many users yet or maybe because it's 8:30 on a sunday morning.

It is just like my Ubuntu box at work but 10x faster.

I'm paying monthly for the linode, just trying it for now. If I'm still using it in August I may ditch site5 as linode is far cooler.

Damn, have to go out

Noticed from access log that I had forgotten to supply an atom module when I upgraded to Drupal 4.6.0. There isn't one on the drupal download site and a grep through the source for 'atom' gave nothing so I copied my 4.5.x version and it Just Worked (e.g). I'm not sure who it is that is downloading the atom feed it but I'd hate to disappoint them.

Another awTags feature is pinging technorati with tags (or something like that). From my statcounter logs I see I am already getting more traffic from there.

For years now I have had a quick launch icon to fire up windows explorer. Whenever I use someone else's pc I tediously navigate through Start/All Programs/Accessories to get to explorer, far too fiddly. The other day someone watched me do this while I tried to fix her pc and she asked me why I didn't just right click on start and pick 'explore'. Well, it's because I didn't realise it was there!

Two concepts I have been contemplating recently are starting to blur together: outliners and tags.

I have read of people who have moved from Outliners to Wikis as a means of organising their notes. I have found Wiki's rather simplistic and unattractive, especially as web-based editors are sluggish compared to desktop applications.

However, now I have changed my site to use awTags I see how tags can be used to implement a wiki. But this is better than a wiki: a link leads to a list of related articles rather than just a single page. In the manner of an outliner, an article leads on to a list of child articles according to which tag you follow. The article itself can be tagged with a number of different tags representing different concepts that the article itself can be filed under and these links can be regarded as parent relationships. This is just what TheBrain is trying to do: Mind Mapping but without the fancy graphics.

I have altered my wilki module accordingly and have used it right there. By typing in something as simple as

[wilki|tags/wilki]

I created a link to all my wilki module related postings filed under the wilki tag. Alternatively, I could have linked to the wilki introductory article and from there a reader, once they know what the wilki module is, can follow the wilki tag if they so desire.

This is all pretty abstract and I will have to see if it is actually of any use in the real world. On a practical level it will be easier for me to reference other articles by linking to the tag name, rather than trying to find the drupal node number of a specific article I am thinking of. The downside is that going to the introductory article is probably a better pattern to follow, especially as articles are listed in reverse chronological order, putting the most informative introduction at the very end.

I use bloglines for my rss aggregation. On it I subscribe to my own rss feeds to reassure myself that they are reaching the outside world. Since I installed the awtags module my postings have all contained links to their tag entries. This doesn't really bother me, it may encourage people to visit my site if they see useful links in the rss feed.

Bloglines tries to deliver articles that have changed and it appears to do this by comparing the contents of the rss file with its previous contents. If there are any small changes bloglines displays the article in the same way as it does for new articles.

I don't like to hastle people when I edit articles to correct spelling mistakes or whatever so I have altered the drupal ping module to only ping (i.e. tell the outside world) if a new posting is created, not if it is modified. However, bloglines appears to poll my feed and so the slightest change will result in articles appearing as if the are new. Today I assigned some tags to some older articles using awtags and this was suficient for the them to be displayed by blogines as new articles as they were still in the rss feed.

This is the long way of apologising to anyone who thinks I a winding them up by republishing old articles with no noticable changes.

I see I have a new subscribed on bloglines. Welcome, hope you find my whitterings interesting. I am getting more visitors since I started using awtags, especially from technorati.